A new day and new rumors around the now famous BMW Project i. According to the controversial British magazine, Autoexpress, BMW has teamed up with UK based Bath University to design the future Isetta vehicles, the two, three and four-wheeled city cars we kept hearing about. The Clever Concept designed by them was shown on here just last week, so these “latest rumors” are not really that new, but to go even further and assume that the Isetta brand will be revived…..well, it’s a bit adventurous at this time.
While we agree that the MegaCity vehicles are coming, there have been no indications recently that BMW decided to sell them under the Isetta name, on the contrary, all the recent reports point to the first Project i vehicles being sold under the MINI brand, with the first model carrying the MINI-i name tag.
The MegaCity vehicles part of the Project i division, will be powered by gasoline, diesel and electric engines, with the first prototype being launched featuring gasoline engines developed in collaboration with the Motorrad division.
Even though at one point BMW was looking for an engineering firm that will help them develop the vehicles, BMW confirmed that they will be built by them in Germany at BMW factories , no outsourcing is being considered.
AutoExpress goes further with their assumptions and talk about the Isetta cars appearing in showrooms as early as 2011, in contradiction with what Herr Norbert Reithofer said yesterday during his annual general meeting speech: first production models are expected around 2015.
We just wanted to give our input in this since many of the media outlets took their story today and ran with it, kinda confirming their assumptions. At least we got to see an interesting rendering of what the Isetta might look like which is….a little too Beetle for us.
[Source: AutoExpress ]
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